Ok, I think that everyone agrees that the paleo list of foods does NOT contain
any of the following foods:

milk, or any dairy product
soy beans, other legumes, or other beans of any type, peanuts.
any grain (wheat, oats, barley, rye, rice, corn, or other grains)
any refined sugar.  It is generally considered that honey does not count as a
refined sugar, since it was availiable to people during paleolithic times)
Any highly processed food, any artificially synthesized food.

I think it was Ray Audette who first came up with the "naked with a stick"
method of determining if some food was paleo.  It requires a little bit of
knowledge of how food comes to be the way it is in the store, but, if you stare
 at the food, and ask yourself, "now, if I were naked with a stick (and/or some
rocks), and I found this plant or animal in the wild, could I work it out, in a
reasonable amount of work, to eat it?".  If it's a nut, yes, you could probably
process the nut sufficiently with a stick (or nearby rocks) to eat it.  You
could probably nail a fish with that stick too, you dexterous primate, you.  A
twinkie, however... ("well, if I found some wild wheat grass, and, uh, then
pound it between two rocks, and.. then, uh, you know, sift it with some finely
made basket I made out of grass, and then, you know, add some dried banana...")
forget it.  No one works that hard for a twinkie.

in the more disputed list, potatoes (and other tubers -- malanga, taro, sweet
potato, yam) are listed because (disputed) they are not edible raw (before I
developed allergies, I'd eaten raw potato with no ill effect).  Sometimes,
concepts of the low-carb diets get mixed in with paleo, I've noticed, possibly
because people feel that paleo diets were much higher in protein and lower in
carbs (which is probably true).  I cook my meat, and still consider myself
paleo.  To me, the benefits of cooking meat outweigh the disadvantages, and
furthermore, cooking meat does go back quite a way.  Some people feel that new
world foods (the nightshades were recently talked about, potatoes, tomatoes,
eggplant, and tobacco are the popular ones) are too recently a part of the
human diet to be included.  Some disagree.   I beleve that the advantages of
variety they offer outweigh any possible disadvantages they may have from being
poorly adapted for.  Cooking vegatables is disputed.  I cook some, but not
others.

Really, there is no list because there is no single way to "go paleo".  The
biggest point in dispute is how long a change in our diet has to be there
before humans will adapt (survive and thrive) on the new diet.  Different
foods and food technologies entered the scenes at drastically different
times.  For example, cooking was probably around long before grains.  And
grains were a part of our diet for longer than soy beans were.  And
refining the grains has been done for much less time than simply eating
them has.  Artifical food coloring, is, of course, brand new.  It gets worse,
specific genetic lines have encountered the same food at drastically
different times.  The truth is, probably no one follows a perfectly paleo diet.
To do so, you would more or less have to live with some h/g's, because getting
purely paleo foods in modern society is difficult.  I intend to get as close as
I can, however.

A purely paleo diet would consist of a very high variety of foods (much higher
than today's typical modern diet), and would have meat as a significant portion
of the total food intake.  The meat would be fresh, and come from hunted game,
which in turn lived in a natural environment, for each represented species.
For example, the bird meat would not be from birds fed on soy, because birds do
not, in the wild, eat soy.  Now you are beginning to see why eating a purely
paleo diet is so difficult -- you not only have to eat what is right for you,
but (with admittedly less importance) the animals you eat have to eat what is
right for them.  The reason for this is because the wrong diet changes the body
composition of an animal so much (including human!) that the flesh from the
animal is different enough from the wild to have an effect on you.  For
example, the meat from cattle who are fed grain instead of grasses, which
similiar animals might eat in the wild, is much higher in fat.
In addition to meat, there would be fruit and berries, at least during the
summer, and vegatables.  There would also be eggs, seeds, insects, and nuts.
Perhaps, depending on the tribe, our paleo ancestors would also have access to
fish, shellfish, and sea vegetables.  I suspect strongly that these were a big
part of the diet, since being around water is so important to human beings
anyway, no doubt we would have taken advantage of the food in the water.  We
don't miss much, as a species.

Anyway, sorry I couldn't direct you to a specific list.  In my experience, it
just doesn't work that way.  The diet you end up with, even if it is paleo,
will probably not be the same as any other person's on this list.

Erik





On Wed, 29 Dec 1999, you wrote:
> I am requesting this again, because it is very important for me to
> understand what is and isnt considered at least disputably paleo--I really
> want to change my diet and aim for full paleo during the next year, but this
> is quite hard without some guidelines.
>
> Could someone pretty please give me the name of a site or a link with a
> comprehensive list of paleo foods, preferably including those in dispute?
>
> Thank you so much!
>
> Judith